Good work, you crazy bastard. Thanks for keeping up on your ride report- I just wish I were there to help!

20 hours of surgery so far and my pelvis is fixed. Tomorrow morning I'll go under so they can rebuild my femur and fix what they did in El Salvador. As it is, my right femur is 2" shorter than my left.

Wow Justin, it's such a bummer to hear about that awful accident. But at least now you're getting fixed up properly. Life goes on... el pasado pisado... quite the story to entertain people with, and warn them; I can see you as a grandfather telling your wide-eyed grandkids...

20 hours of surgery so far and my pelvis is fixed. Tomorrow morning I'll go under so they can rebuild my femur and fix what they did in El Salvador. As it is, my right femur is 2" shorter than my left.

Justin

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Damn:eek1 I guess I was reallyh lucky, I broke my lt leg bad in Venezuela and had surgery and it was spot on perfect @ probably a 1/3 of the cost in the US. Totally suck to have a dodgy job done and have a total redo

Good work, you crazy bastard. Thanks for keeping up on your ride report- I just wish I were there to help!

20 hours of surgery so far and my pelvis is fixed. Tomorrow morning I'll go under so they can rebuild my femur and fix what they did in El Salvador. As it is, my right femur is 2" shorter than my left.

Stay safe and stay in touch!

Justin

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I hope you found Dr Douglas Beaman 501 N Graham Suite 250
Portland, OR. 503 249- 0719 He's the best around and lower extremities are his specialty.
Best of luck and be patient, these things take time.
Phillip

Good work, you crazy bastard. Thanks for keeping up on your ride report- I just wish I were there to help!

20 hours of surgery so far and my pelvis is fixed. Tomorrow morning I'll go under so they can rebuild my femur and fix what they did in El Salvador. As it is, my right femur is 2" shorter than my left.

Stay safe and stay in touch!

Justin

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Hey Justin good luck with your surgeries. I will be going through Portland tonight and sunday sometime. I would love to stop by and check on you if you'd have me. PM me with some details.

Man.... You're taking a huge gamble riding that thing to the corner, much less to Lima, with the sprocket in that condition. I'd arrange to store it and get your parts by bus. And I recommend NOT to tighten your chain the way you've been doing it. Keep it loose! Your sprocket / shaft problems and chain stretching are indicating having set the chain too tight.

Here is a diagram of a chain drive and swing arm - with a line between the sprocket centerlines passing through the centerline of the swingarm pivot.

To realize this is the tightest the chain will ever get, over the suspension travel, imagine the rear moving up or down from this aligned position. Since the swingarm pivot is between the sprocets, you can see that the distance between the sprockets (labelled 24" in the above image) will decrease to less and thus the chain will become more slack.

Hence, if the chain slack is set to a minimum acceptable value, just loose enough to not be under tension, in this case about 1/2" of play in the center of span, at the longest distance between the two sprockets, as above, then the chain will be properly tensioned for full suspension travel. It should be not sloppy but not under any tension in this position of max tightness.

I know you must feel terrible about pulling out onto the road when a car was coming. The great thing is you got off without getting hurt, not to mention getting off easy paying the guy $100 and not even going to cool your heels in jail. You were super-lucky on so many levels! God is with you, and here he was reminding you - perhaps you are not praying enough

Slow down a bit and focus, brother in spirit.

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Did I miss something. How do you know the condition of his sprocket? How do you know how he is tightening his chain? I'm so lost...

Ulyses also posted over in the XRL section. Quite a few of us from there have been following along as well, some more verbally than others.

I'll echo the sentiments of others who have written in saying that I'm really enjoying the South America ride reports this winter; between you, Bubbletron, and RTWpaul, I've had plenty of non-drizzle photos to enjoy!

Good work, you crazy bastard. Thanks for keeping up on your ride report- I just wish I were there to help!

20 hours of surgery so far and my pelvis is fixed. Tomorrow morning I'll go under so they can rebuild my femur and fix what they did in El Salvador. As it is, my right femur is 2" shorter than my left.

...Did I miss something. How do you know the condition of his sprocket? How do you know how he is tightening his chain? I'm so lost...

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I hope I didn't let the cat out of the bag
See the sprocket pics for yourself.
I hope he's not on the way to Lima with that front sprocket flopping around on the output shaft like that! And a tight chain trying to rip if off... There will be little joy of it if he ends up having to replace the output shaft. I wish he would check in...

PS: how do you "piss off hippies in Corvallis" with his HD? That sounds like an interesting story...

I hope I didn't let the cat out of the bag
See the sprocket pics for yourself.
I hope he's not on the way to Lima with that front sprocket flopping around on the output shaft like that! And a tight chain trying to rip if off... There will be little joy of it if he ends up having to replace the output shaft. I wish he would check in...

PS: how do you "piss off hippies in Corvallis" with his HD? That sounds like an interesting story...

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I'm all caught up now, I went through the last couple of page of the XRL only thread. And yeah he should update us. I'm curious as to what the rear sprocket looks like.

Well like most Harleys his is loud and obnoxious, unless your on it then it sounds absolutely badass. Right next to campus there is a really hippie/hipster coffee shop and when ever I make a pass by it I give the bike a lot of throttle and shake the windows a little bit. It's loud enough to set off car alarms so I figure I'm rattling some patchouli stinking hippie.

I'm all caught up now, I went through the last couple of page of the XRL only thread. And yeah he should update us. I'm curious as to what the rear sprocket looks like.

Well like most Harleys his is loud and obnoxious, unless your on it then it sounds absolutely badass. Right next to campus there is a really hippie/hipster coffee shop and when ever I make a pass by it I give the bike a lot of throttle and shake the windows a little bit. It's loud enough to set off car alarms so I figure I'm rattling some patchouli stinking hippie.

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I know that this isn't you (and, that you have of course seen this before). Sorry, I couldn't resist reminding you.

Well, I made it to Lima. Lot's more adventures today: freezing my ass off, more bike problems (nothing to do with sprockets or chains), and some more outright bribery of Peruvians.

By the way, the front sprocket isn't as loose as it may have seemed; the chain on the other hand just refuses to stay tight! I'll be hunting for a new chain tomorrow. I have a 14 tooth front sprocket to swap out with the old one and I know a guy who's flying to Peru in a few days who is going to bring me a new XRR 15 tooth front.

Whew, glad you made it without the sprocket stripping out on the shaft! If it had the play you recorded in your original post, I don't see how that's possible. But hopefully you pulled the sprocket and verified the shaft is in good shape. Don't forget to grease the splines on the shaft where the sprocket engages. That sprocket should fit the shaft pretty snug, you know... any slop banging back and forth will wipe out the splines on the sprocket and shaft! The teeth didn't look all that worn but certainly have him bring you a new front sprocket! Chain and rear sprocket too, if possible.

Looking forward to another engaging update! Lots of interesting stuff today it sounds like.
Last time I left off in the past I believe you'd made it to Panama. Hard to keep up with two timelines at once.

Good work, you crazy bastard. Thanks for keeping up on your ride report- I just wish I were there to help!

20 hours of surgery so far and my pelvis is fixed. Tomorrow morning I'll go under so they can rebuild my femur and fix what they did in El Salvador. As it is, my right femur is 2" shorter than my left.

While I was eating I met a couple of fellow overlanders who had driven their Toyota Fourrunner down here from Austin, Texas.

They've been on the road for 11 months! They ended up getting married in Guatemala. What a honeymoon! They have a pretty sweet setup in the Toyota. They usually just park in front of a Hostel, pirate the wifi, pay for a shower, and sleep in the back of their rig. For the life of me I can't remember their names; they're probably going to be angry with me when they read this as I gave them the address for the ride report.....

After I left the Texans, I found this hilarious sign above a nearby drive way:

I suppose these kinds of signs are necessary when you live next to a bunch of Hostels and bars.

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We really enjoyed bumping into you guys in Medellin. Hopefully we'll catch up to you soon, we're next to the Amazon in Misahualli, Ecuador.

For the record we totally didn't pee in that dude's driveway...we were able to find better alternatives

We try to avoid the 'camp in front of a hostel' move, but sometimes in big cities it's unavoidable. I still can't believe how big of a ghost town Medellin was for Christmas!

Leaving Huaraz and heading south along the Cordillera Blanca is an excellent ride! Unfortunately, you do get up to 13,500 feet and things can start getting a little cold. However, right after you top out, the decent back into the desert begins.

The decent was phenomenal as well; however, an ever expanding chain which threatened to disintegrate at any moment kept me from enjoying the hairpin turns, switch backs, and incredible views.

Eventually things leveled out and I was back in the desert.

We finally made it back to the Panamerican Highway where I pulled over to remove some layers. As I was rolling into the gravel, I noticed that my front end felt mushy. I looked down at my front wheel and realized that I had a flat. I cursed my luck and jumped off the bike to start swapping out the tube. As I did so, I looked down at my luggage rack and realized that it was starting to crack, again! Double deuce!

Up until this point, I've had just about every other kind of misfortune hunt me down; but so far flats have kept their distance. But apparently, I'm in a bad streak of luck right now.

Oh well. Adapt, improvise, and overcome. I busted out my tools and got to work. I was immediately glad that I had build that enduro stand yesterday; it worked like a charm:

I got the wheel off....

....and the tire off....

...and then realized what a horrible idea Slime is. Looks like I'm never using that stuff again. I ended up spending an extra 10 minutes just cleaning the goo off of the tire and the rim.

As I was de-Slime-ing my wheels, a large four door Jeep wrangler with Georgia plates comes screaming off the road and pulls in in front of us. A fellow overlander hopped out and offered his help and some cold Gatorade. I gladly accepted both.

Unfortunately, I can't remember his name and I forgot to have him sign my tank! He was a hell of a guy. He even busted out his ARB air compressor and we had the new tube aired up in a few seconds. Sure beats my little 12 volt compressor.

With everything aired up, I slapped the wheel back on and everything was as good as new. All told, it only took about 30 minutes to get everything swapped out and fixed; and that includes the 10 minutes spent cleaning off all of the Slime.

I got a picture with my mysterious benefactor, put my gear back on, and hit the road.

The last 100 miles into Lima were more of the same: hazy, wind swept desert. We saw some fairly impressive shanty towns:

We finally arrived in Lima around 5:00 PM and ran straight into a wall of traffic. I found out later that Lima has over 7,000,000 people! Definitely the kind of place that I would normally avoid.

As we were riding through town, an angry couple of Peruvians pulled up next to me and started shouting at me angrily. I pulled over to see what was the matter; apparently I had struck one of their side mirrors with my panniers and cracked the plastic while cutting through traffic. Bubbletron confirmed this for me as I hadn't noticed, so I apologized and gave them about $20. Man, Peru is killing my wallet!

We finally got to the Barranco district of Lima and found that the Hostel that we had been trying to get to was full. We hunted around and finally found a place with some "Dakar" graffiti and figured that was good enough.

As I was unpacking my bags, I started thinking about the past three days: hit by a car, nasty stomach bug, flat tire, broken luggage rack (fourth time), and bribing Peruvians over broken mirrors. I started laughing at the absurdity of it all, then broke into that Ray LaMontagne song:

"Trouble...
Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble
Trouble been doggin' my soul since the day I was born..."

Don't know if you're following Dakar or not, but it was a strange day today on Stage 7 - Caselli (USA) won the stage and a poor young French rider 106 Thomas Bourgin (FRA) was the victim of a fatal traffic accident on the link route as he made his way to the start of the day's special stage. My heart goes out to his family.............